Completionism - a design philosophy to ease your workload

A friend of mine once said something clever about the creating process:

Add until there's nothing more to add, and take away until there's nothing more to take away.

Let's call it the completionism, since this mindset would in theory create a "complete" piece of work. While this isn't the only way to finish a project, my friend did touch on something very important: simplicity is king. This is especially true when it comes to deciding what message you want to convey, but maybe it's also applicable to actual techniques?

I did a quick half-hour test. In the images above I've only done the following:

Photographed part of pictures

Adjusted colours

Put one photo on top of the other

Cut out pieces of the pictures and moved them

Written random text with the brush tool

I get hooked on techniques sometimes, but for not having done anything special - or even thought them through - these two images have a promising quality.

Note to self: do not overwork projects, Linus! (But think them through!)